Parlor Press Series

Parlor Press publishes nineteen book series, each of which has a particular focus and submission guidelines. Prospective authors should review the series mission and those guidelines prior to submitting their work for review. Each series page also includes links to all books on its list.

Aesthetic Critical Inquiry

Series EditorAndrea Feeser
Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory
Clemson University

Update: This series is no longer acccepting new submissions. — 9/4/2011

Series Description

At least from the beginning of the
twentieth century, artists and scholars have created critical investigations
presented in aesthetic terms through word and image. Neither conventional
academic text nor traditional work of art, this hybrid research produces
knowledge by combining rigorous analysis with affective visual and written
language. Such material appeals to the mind and the senses, and operates
on the premise that learning occurs most powerfully when intellectual
study incorporates noumenal and phenomenal experience. Important examples
of aesthetic critical inquiry include illustrated essays in Surrealist
periodicals; Conceptual art that interrogates theory; poetically written
and creatively designed cultural criticism; and digital projects that
deliver information and ideas through artful web design.

This series provides a forum for aesthetic critical inquiry through
the printed and digital book format and aims to defy developing categories
for interdisciplinary research. Interdisciplinarity is currently understood
in terms of hybrid subjects and/or methods within academic scholarship.
Aesthetic critical inquiry bridges academic scholarship and artistic
creation, and thereby fundamentally questions not only what we know,
but also how we know it. Because of this emphasis on interdisciplinarity,
the series will highlight collaborative endeavors between writers and
artists.

The New Measure Poetry Prize

Parlor Press's poetry series, Free Verse Editions, is pleased to announce the ninth annual New Measure Poetry Prize, which will carry a cash award of $1,000 and publication of an original, unpublished manuscript of poems. Up to four other manuscripts may be accepted for publication by Free Verse Editions editors. Submit a manuscript of at least 54 pages with a $28 entry fee between March 1 and June 30, 2019.The judge for this year's competition is Peter Gizzi.

Click on this Submit button to visit the New Measure Poetry Prize submission interface at Submittable on or after March 1 and no later than June 30:

The New Measure Poetry Prize Winners

2018: Empire by Tracy Zeman [selected by Jon Thompson]
2017: Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air by Elizabeth Jacobson [selected by Marianne Boruch]
2016: The Miraculous Courageous by Josh Booton [selected by Jon Thompson]
2015: This History That Just Happened by Hannah Craig [selected by Yusef Komunyakaa]
2014: Spool by Matthew Cooperman [selected by Jon Thompson]
2013: No Shape Bends the River So Long by Monica Berlin and Beth Marzoni [Selected by Carolyn Forché]
2012: Dismantling the Angel by Eric Pankey [selected by Jon Thompson]
2011: The Canticle of the Night Path by Jennifer Atkinson [selected by Susan Stewart]
2010: Country Album by James Capozzi [selected by Jon Thompson]
2009: 13 Ways of Happily by Emily Carr [selected by Cole Swensen]

Other manuscripts not selected for the New Measure Poetry Prize may still be eligible for publication by Free Verse Editions. Friends and former students of the judge are not eligible for the prize but may submit for publication to Free Verse Editions (please indicate whether the submission is for the prize or for publication only). Each manuscript should be word processed, paginated, and contain a list of acknowledgments for published or forthcoming poems. The title page should include the name of the author, a postal address, telephone number, and email address. No feedback on submitted manuscripts can be offered. The recipient of the next New Measure Poetry Prize will be announced in December 2017. The judge for this year's competition is Marianne Boruch.

Free Verse Editions

We are especially interested in collections that use language to dramatize a singular vision of experience, a mastery of craft, a deep knowledge of poetic tradition, and a willingness to take risks. As the series title suggests, the series is oriented toward free verse, but we will happily consider poetry written in traditional forms. Collections should have individual poems published in well-known journals. We will read collections that do not have a track record of publications, but it is unlikely that they will be accepted for publication.

Given the series' commitment to publishing a
diverse array of styles, Parlor Press will not make a practice of regularly
publishing second books by Free Verse Editions authors.

An announcement about the manuscripts accepted for publication will be made in December each year. The announcement will appear on the Free Verse website as well as here.

Entries must be submitted electronically via Submittable: Click on this Submit button to visit the New Measure Poetry Prize submission interface at Submittable on or after March 1 and no later than June 30:
The submission form will ask for contact information and allows for submission notes.

Manuscripts should be between 54 and 150 pages and professionally presented.

Manuscripts should be original, unpublished works. Original translations may also be considered.

The reading fee is $28.00 and will be collected at the time of submission.

The editor of Free Verse Editions reserves the right to accept for publication as many as five manuscripts or none if he deems the quality of the submissions insufficient. The editor also reserves the right to solicit manuscripts for the series. Needless to say, not all the manuscripts accepted in a given year will be solicited. Free Verse Editions is committed to publishing new voices, as well as being open to more established ones.

Manuscripts accepted for publication can be revised before publication.

Submission period: March 1- June 30, annually.

Note: Please do not call, write, or email the editor, or Parlor Press, to inquire about your manuscript during the reading period.

Parlor Press is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles
in print and multimedia formats, including Acrobat eBook, ePub, and iBook. For submission information, see http://www.parlorpress.com/submissions, write to Parlor
Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson SC 29621, or e-mail David
Blakesley <editor@parlorpress.com>. 765.409.2649

Announcing the 2016-2017 Free Verse Editions

Ana Cristina César, At Your Feet, edited by Brenda Hillman and Katrina Dodson. Translated by Brenda Hillman, Helen Hillman, Sebastião Edson Macedo, and Katrina Dodson
Ana Cristina César (1952-1983) has posthumously become one of Brazil’s best known avant-garde poets. After her suicide in 1983, her innovative, mythic, and dreamlike poetry has greatly influenced subsequent generations of writers. At Your Feet was originally published as a poetic sequence and later became part of a longer hybrid work— sometimes prose, sometimes verse—documenting the life and mind of a forcefully active literary woman. César, who also worked internationally as a journalist and translator, often found inspiration in the writings of other poets, among them Emily Dickinson, Armando Freitas Filho, and Gertrude Stein. Her innovative writing has been featured in Green Integer's Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain—20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets (2000). Poet Brenda Hillman and her mother Helen Hillman (a native speaker of Portuguese) worked with Brazilian poet Sebastião Edson Macedo and translator/editor Katrina Dodson to render as faithfully as possible the intricately layered poems of this legendary writer.

Hannah Craig, This History That Just Happened [New Measure Poetry Prize Winner, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa].
"Hannah Craig's This History That Just Happened places the reader at the nexus where rural and city life converge, bridging a world personal and political, natural and artful, in a voice always uniquely hers. Every word here is earned. And little, if anything, escapes this poet's heart, mind, or eye. History works through a keen imagination. These poems make us feel and listen differently, and images coalesce line by line and dare us to reside where fierce empathy and beauty abide."—Yusef Komunyakaa

Derek Gromadzki, Pilgrimage Suites
Reading itself is travel in Derek Gromadzki's first book, Pilgrimage Suites, an outing across an insular medieval landscape as rich in its registers of language as in its flora or fauna. This book is neither history nor story, though it retains characteristics of each. Like history, it perpetuates retrograde speculation while maintaining the narrated sequencing of incident that is the common stock and trade of story. In the heyday of medieval pilgrimages, English underwent radical changes. The Latinate speech of Church officialdom ran roughly up against a vernacular with deep Germanic and Brythonic roots. These suites track an imagined journey over the landscape that staged the violence of this conflict, whereon strikingly beautiful monuments stood in the aftermath. To the cultural clashes and assimilations materially manifest in the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals travelers still venerate today, Gromadzki offers an overlooked parallel through creative strife with sound. He uses the momentum generated in running the lexical and rhythmic possibilities of English's varied sources together to stretch and sustain the lyric over a pastoral background to push each of these two modes past its respective limits.

Geraldine Monk, They Who Saw the Deep
At the heart of They Who Saw The Deep are poems concerning rivers and seas. From the Libyan Sea south of Crete to the savage tidal bores of Morecambe Bay in the North of England, our relationship with these vast tracts of water is benign and lethal in equal measures. The title sequence is set against the hypnotic backdrop of the British shipping forecast as the world grows increasingly troubled with wars and wild weather events. It weaves deluge myths with tales of migrations and invasions down the ages. "Geraldine Monk's poetry is a treasure, and They Who Saw the Deep is extravagant proof. A vocabulary ripe to the point of ferment. Lines lithe and various. Gritty dazzle. Vertiginous control. The title sequence is a water-torn triumph, a mercurial inventory of birds, wars, seas, weathers, vegetables and wrecks. With kinetic brilliance and valorous abandon, Monk forages the deeps."—Catherine Wagner

Nicolas Pesquès's, Overyellow, translated by Cole Swensen
This is a book about a color—the vivid, explosive yellow of the English broom that blooms outrageously, uproariously, all over the mountain that dominates the view from Nicolas Pesquès' window. In this loping long poem, Pesquès views this color as installation art—as if the word YELLOW were written in enormous letters covering the hillside. It's an installation that brings issues of language to the fore, offering an occasion for the writer to juggle the immediate presence of color with the more mitigated presence created by language.

Donald Platt, Man Praying
In his sixth book, Donald Platt starts a poem by exclaiming, "The days are one thousand / puzzle pieces." He gathers up the days into this book of terrors and ecstasies decanted in seamlessly reversing tercets of long and short lines, syllabic couplets, and lyric prose. The puzzle pieces include a dying father-in-law, AIDS, maimed World War I veterans, Caravaggio's painting of the beheading of St. John the Baptist (his largest canvas), and the story of a gay boxer who KOs and kills the opponent who has called him a faggot at the weigh-in. It is a book that encompasses contradictions. The poet writes about his bisexuality, his close and intimate marriage, Rudolf Nureyev, a daughter with manic depression, a painting by James Ensor entitled Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889,and la Playa los Muertos, the Beach of the Dead in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The poet puts these fragments of a life together into a thousand-piece jigsaw, a self-portrait of the artist in middle age, and calls it unabashedly Man Praying.

Ethel Rackin, Go On
The miniature poems that comprise Go On, Ethel Rackin's second collection, constitute distilled moments in time that paradoxically extend our field of concentration and vision. Focusing on various kinds of survival—personal, political, environmental—Go On asks what it means to endure in unsure times. By turns collaged, diaristic, and panoramic, the poems that make up this collection combine to form a kind of crazy-quilt of lyric association and connection.

Christopher Sindt, System and PopulationChristopher Sindt's System and Population returns to the primary theme of Sindt's earlier collection, The Bodies: the impact of human desire on the natural world. System and Population focuses on the proposed damming of the American River canyon in northern California—working with source texts such as geologic studies, government documents, and the diaries of gold miners—to study the intersections of personal experience, scientific study, and the politics of rivers and dams. It is a personal eco-poetics that embraces the tradition of the lyric, experimenting with collage and the explicit inclusion of historic and scientific data. System and Population meditates on human experiences, such as parenthood and loss, and also studies the dissociative effects of environmental damage and disaster.

Announcing the 2017 Free Verse Editions

Bruce Bond, Dear Reader
In his single-poem sequence, Dear Reader, Bruce Bond explores the metaphysics of reading as central to the way we negotiate a world—the evasions of our gods and monsters; our Los Angeles in flames; the daily chatter of our small, sweet, and philosophical beasts. In light of an imagined listener and the world taken as a whole, Bond sees the summons of the self in the other and the way the other in the self informs our sacrifices and reckoning, our speechless hesitations, our jokes and our rituals of loss. Every moment of personal and political life, interpretation holds the page of the human face, not far but far enough, and all the while, beneath our gaze, the subtext that is no text at all, where the old argument between universals and particulars breaks down, exhausted, and the real in the imagined is, by necessity, renewed.

Bruce Bond is the author of sixteen books including, most recently, For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press, 2015), The Other Sky (Etruscan Press, 2015), Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa Press, 2016), and Gold Bee (Crab Orchard Open Competition Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Three of his books are forthcoming: Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, LSU Press), Sacrum (Four Way Books), and Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, Parlor Press). Presently he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas.

Josh Booton, The Miraculous Courageous [New Measure Poetry Prize Winner, selected by Jon Thompson]The Miraculous Courageous is a fractured epic, a sequence which seeks not to explain but to evoke the mind of one boy and his experience with autism. In the tradition Carson's Autobiography of Red, Booton constructs a landscape both familiar and uncanny, a territory where our inner workings burn with the luminosity of jelly fish and "darkness turns the lighthouse on." These poems are agile, slippery, glancing at the camera then quickly away, skewing the boundaries between lyric and monologue, vignette and scene. These poems are a bridge. And through their deft conflation of inner and outer worlds, the self and the other, The Miraculous Courageous marks a rich and startling immersion in the mind of autism.

Josh Booton's debut collection, The Union of Geometry & Ash, was awarded the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize and published by Bear Star Press. His poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Hayden's Ferry Review, Iron Horse and elsewhere. He works as a pediatric Speech-Language Pathologist specializing in children and adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Elizabeth Robinson, Rumor
What is the dividing line between ugly and beautiful, aggressive and resigned? How does one demarcate the fluid boundaries of gender? Between the idiosyncratically local and the universal? In Rumor, Elizabeth Robinson spins out the narrative line of a series of unsolved Victorian murders. Here, what cannot be known, what can only be rumored, emerges as the greatest ethical challenge. These poems undertake the transgression of the irresolvable.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Counterpart (Ahsahta) and Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing). Her mixed genre meditation On Ghosts (Solid Objects) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Robinson has been a winner of the National Poetry Series, the Fence Modern Poets Prize, and grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Fund for Poetry. In the fall of 2016, she was a fellow at the Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France. Robinson works for Boulder Municipal Court as an advocate for homeless defendants.

Simon Smith, Day In, Day OutDay In, Day Out is a book of journal poems mapping the time period between 11th April 2012 and 27th June 2014 – on the track of American poet/translator Paul Blackburn – between San Diego and Brooklyn, with stop offs in New York City, London, Vancouver, L.A. and Glasgow. Each poem is in the moment of its detail and the materiality of its experience, which only these foreign eyes passing through and about and around those distant places can realise. Its pacing is breakneck and nonchalant, hysterical and insouciant, blurred, with a pin-sharp focus. This is poetry fully alive to its particular time and place, steeped in the precision of its perceptions and the act of perceiving. This is a book that telescopes the long-distance of the past into the talismanic immediate, articulating and attending to particularity over generality in the process. It is a book that explores and interrogates the world by plane rather than road, tips straight ahead, attuned to attention itself.

Simon Smith's latest collection is More Flowers Than You Could Possibly Carry: Selected Poems 1989-2012 (Shearsman Books, 2016). Salon Noir, a new book of poems, from Equipage, has just appeared. The Fortnightly Review and the Los Angeles Review have carried essays on his work.He is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent in England.

Felicia Zamora, & in Open, Marvel& in Open, Marvel grapples with wonder in everyday existence. A sense of quietness through seasonal change threads the interlaced contemplations in the collection, which approach the twice-removed space we occupy from the physical world. The act of mind and body is experienced as a journey for both writer and reader. How we are all elements in fall. How we are all purpose. How what makes us connects us. How there are lovely works beyond us, which in turn, include us. How we plead to ourselves, See…just see.

Felicia Zamora is author of Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (University of Notre Dame 2017). She won the 2015Tomaž Šalamun Prize (Verse), authored two chapbooks, is an associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review, and holds an MFA from Colorado State University. Her poems are found in Columbia Poetry Review, Crazyhorse,Indiana Review, Meridian, North American Review, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, The Adirondack Review, The Cincinnati Review,TriQuarterly Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Verse Daily,Witness Magazine, West Branch, and more.

Announcing the 2018 Free Verse Editions

Elizabeth Jacobson Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air[New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch]

Elizabeth Jacobson's Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air is a collection of poems wealthy with the speaker's intimacy with nature, and with the philosophical and spiritual insights that emerge from a deep practice of close observation. In a manner that is wonderfully relaxed and conversational, Jacobson's poems enter into the most venerable and perennial of our human questions, like, 'Why is human consciousness confused and forgetful?' 'What is the distance between nature and ourselves?' 'Why is solitude so rich?' Jacobson's subject matter, ingenuity, and style invite comparison to the work of some of our most luminous poetic contemporaries, like Linda Gregg and Jane Hirschfield. Passionate, lucid and meticulous, this collection of poems represents the emergence of a remarkable poet.

Joshua McKinney, Small Sillion

Joshua McKinney's fourth collection, Small Sillion, enacts a lyric struggle to perceive the numinous in a world marked by violence. The term sillion, as used by Hopkins in his famous poem, "The Windhover," refers to a furrow turned over by a plough. For McKinney it is both prelude to fertility, and wound, a scarring of the land. Maintaining a tension between the visionary and the mundane, between joy and despair, these poems posit a border between language and the living world; they constitute a personal eco-poetics of skepticism, one that respects language's utility and radiance, while acknowledging that the world's complexity lies beyond the grasp of language

F. Daniel Rzicznek's Settlers

Transversing the territory between the pastoral and the elegiac, F. Daniel Rzicznek's Settlers inhabits the hidden, wild places of the American Midwestern landscape. The idea of "settling"—that a landscape can be tamed, that a human consciousness can fall back into immobility—is one these poems grapple with and resist, all the while charting the cathartic effects of the natural world on a collective imagination dually wounded by the madness of the post-industrial era and the multiplication of tragedy via media saturation. Within the "settled" landscape, it becomes clear that nothing, in fact, can be settled. Love, compassion, forgiveness, and transcendence all turn out to be moving targets and Settlers offers glimpse after glimpse of an unstable world in whirling, mesmerizing motion. Where the exterior landscape of weather, light and water skirts the interior wilderness of dream, vision, and prayer, these poems go out walking with their feet in the marsh and their hats in the infinite clouds, hoping to find what exactly it means to be human in a world imperiled by humans, and the all the fascinating and frustrating complexities contained therein.

Electracy and Transmedia Studies

Series Editors
Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes
Clemson University

The Electracy and Transmedia Studies Series publishes research that examines the mixed realities that emerge through electracy, play, rhetorical knowledge, game design, community, code, and transmedia artifacts. This book series aims to augment traditional artistic and literate forms with examinations of electrate and literate play in the age of transmedia. Writing about play should, in other words, be grounded in playing with writing. The distinction between play and reflection, as Stuart Moulthrop argues, is a false dichotomy. Cultural transmedia artifacts that are interactive, that move, that are situated in real time, call for inventive/electrate means of creating new scholarly traction in transdisciplinary fields. The series publishes research that produces such traction through innovative processes that move research forward across its own limiting surfaces (surfaces that create static friction). The series exemplifies extreme points of contact where increased electrate traction might occur. The series also aims to broaden how scholarly treatments of electracy and transmedia can include both academic and general audiences in an effort to create points of contact between a wide range of readers. The Electracy and Transmedia Series follows what Gregory Ulmer calls an image logic based upon a wide scope—“an aesthetic embodiment of one’s attunement with the world."

Your proposal should outline the rationale and projected audience
for the book and its relation to other books in the field; include
the book's table of contents or a chapter outline, the estimated length
and
the timetable for completion, and the introduction and (if available) a sample chapter.
Please also send the CV of the author(s) or editor(s).

Parlor Press is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles
in print and multimedia formats, including Acrobat eBook, iBooks, ePub, and DPS apps. For additional submission information or to find out about Parlor
Press publications visit the website, http://www.parlorpress.com,
write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson SC 29621, or email David Blakesley <editor@parlorpress.com>.

Glassbead Books

Glassbead books will exemplify what academic book publishing should be in an age of electronic publishing: namely, a generous gift culture. All Glassbead books will be available as quality, affordable paperbacks, but also as free PDF downloads. All will be released under a Creative Commons (non-commercial) license. Academic book publishing has poor circulation, which is variously diagnosed but generally goes by the name 'the publishing crisis in the humanities'. We propose that free e plus CC will scour a few clogged arteries and—not only will our patient not die—we predict she will feel a bit better right away.

Glassbead will exemplify what academic book publishing should be in another sense: namely, healthypublic intellectual culture. We will purvey a wide variety of content—ranging from academic specialist works to journalism to critical editions of public domain fiction to new fiction. But we aim to make our mark with works that solve intellectual circulation problems—within the ivory tower and without. We will make books that are maximally available, searchable, usable—by the public and by academics. We will make books the general reader (not so mythical as sometimes reported) and the academic reader will want to make use of.

Our most distinctive offerings—our first releases—will be "book events." Born on blogs as massive, multi-reviewer online seminars, the book events are hybrid creatures, unknown in a paper age. We are proud of the critical work they do, the range of participants they have attracted. And, after the fact, they look quite nice on paper. And we hereby demonstrate what an intellectual gift culture can do for the rest of academic publishing. Not all of these books will be narrowly academic, but the case for their intellectual functionality is clearest in the scholarly cases, and perhaps clearest of all in the humanities. Every book published in the humanities should be widely read, discussed, publicly reviewed—should have its own lively comment box, not to put too fine a point on it. Because any scholarly book incapable of rousing a measure of sustained, considerate, knowledgeable, intelligent criticism and downright bookchat from a few dozen souls specializing in that area . . . needn't have been published, after all. Turning the point around: in an age in which technology assures any book worth publishing can be accompanied by such an event, any book that lacks one has been sadly failed by the academic culture in which it was so unfortunate as to be born. We hope to do our part and, even more so, set an excellent example of how to keep ideas circulating.

The book events staged to date have been hosted, primarily, at Crooked Timber (crookedtimber.org) and The Valve (thevalve.org). Our first "book event" Glassbead book is Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science. Behind it will follow book versions of some subset of the events dedicated to Theory's Empire; The Literary Wittgenstein; How Novels Think; Maps, Graphs and Trees; Freakonomics; The Wealth of Networks; Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; Iron Council. And we have more events to come.

Parlor Press and Glassbead Books

The emergence of Glassbead represents a convergence of just a few of the publishing opportunities enabled by digital technologies. Parlor Press—itself an independent publisher run entirely by scholars and writers--has the flexibility and track record to help foster new publishing ventures like Glassbead. Since its beginnings in 2002, Parlor Press's goal has been to promote independence and innovation in the publishing world, helping others create their own opportunities for cultivating first-rate scholarly and creative work. Collaborative efforts like the one between Parlor and Glassbead, or between Parlor and the WAC Clearinghouse, are new formations in an attention economy. We're looking forward to creating more such alchemic moments.

Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition

Series Editors
Thomas Rickert, Purdue University
Jennifer Bay, Purdue University

The Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition honors the contributions
Janice Lauer Hutton has made to the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition
as a disciplinary study. It publishes scholarship that carries on Professor
Lauer’s varied work in the history of written rhetoric, disciplinarity
in composition studies, contemporary pedagogical theory, and written
literacy theory and research.

Submission and Contact Information

Parlor Press is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles
in print and multimedia formats, including Acrobat eBook and Night Kitchen
(TK3). For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications
visit the website. <http://www.parlorpress.com>, write to Parlor
Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson SC 29621, or e-mail David
Blakesley <editor@parlorpress.com>. 765.409.2649

Lenses on Composition Studies

Series Editors
Sheryl I. Fontaine
California State University Fullerton

Steve Westbrook
California State University Fullerton

Lenses on Composition Studies offers authors the unique opportunity to write for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students who are new to the discipline of Composition Studies. While the series aims to maintain the rigor and depth of contemporary composition scholarship, it seeks to offer this particular group of students an introduction to key disciplinary issues in accessible prose that does not assume prior advanced knowledge of scholars and theoretical debates. Lenses on Composition Studies will provide to instructors of advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students texts that are both appropriate and inviting for this less experienced but professionally directed audience.

We invite prospective authors to write about any of the topics or “lenses” that define our discipline: writing in the disciplines, peer response, administration, active learning, etc. Using this topic as a lens through which to see the entire discipline, authors present to students the specialist’s understanding of the topic and of the discipline itself using theoretical terminology and historical explanations that beginning students in the field need and can understand. These brief (200-page) books should engage novices to the field with interviews, student voices, collaborative writing, quotes from colleagues in the field, or other devices that similarly lend a “real,” immediate quality to the writing. Authors are also encouraged to use descriptive headings throughout each chapter, include activities such as journal entry topics, questions for discussions, informal writing prompts, as well as works cited list and a list of works for further reading.

Your proposal should outline the rationale and projected audience for the book and its relation to other books in the field; include the book's table of contents or a chapter outline, the estimated length and the timetable for completion, and the introduction and a sample chapter. Please also send the c.v. of the author or editor.

Parlor Press is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles
in print and multimedia formats, including Acrobat eBook and Night Kitchen
(TK3). For additional submission information or to find out about Parlor
Press publications visit the website, http://www.parlorpress.com,
write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson SC 29621,
or
e-mail David
Blakesley <editor@parlorpress.com>. 765.409.2649.

New Media Theory

Series Editor:
Byron Hawk
University of South Carolina

The New Media Theory series investigates both media and new media as complex rhetorical ecologies. The merger of media and new media creates a global public sphere that is changing the ways we work, play, write, teach, think, and connect. Because these ecologies operate through evolving arrangements, theories of new media have yet to establish a rhetorical and theoretical paradigm that fully articulates this emerging digital life.

The series includes books that deploy rhetorical, social, cultural, political, textual, aesthetic, and material theories in order to articulate moments of mediation that compose these contemporary media ecologies. Such works typically bring rhetorical and critical theories to bear on media and new media in ways that elaborate on a burgeoning post-disciplinary "material turn" as one further development of the linguistic and social turns that have already influenced scholarly work across the humanities.

Possible Topics

Rhetoric and New Media

Digital Publics

Writing with Sound

Media Ecologies

Tactical Media

Digital Writing

New Material Rhetorics

Complexity Theory

Posthumanism

(Actor) Network Theory

Procedural Rhetorics

Embodied Writing

Digital Art

Computational Writing

Globalism and Technology

Writing through Video

Queries should be directed to Byron Hawk, Editor, New Media Theory,
University of South Carolina, Department of English, Humanities Office Building, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208. Email: byron.hawk@gmail.com.

Perspectives on Writing

The Perspectives on Writing series addresses writing studies in a broad sense. Consistent with the wide ranging approaches characteristic of teaching and scholarship in writing across the curriculum, the series presents works that take divergent perspectives on working as a writer, teaching writing, administering writing programs, and studying writing in its various forms.

The Perspectives on Writing Series is a collaborative publication venture between the WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. It is designed to make new books available freely on the Web and in low-cost print editions.

Submission and Contact Information

Prospects in Visual Rhetoric

Series Editor
Marguerite Helmers
University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh

The
Series includes historical statements on visual culture, art, architecture,
costume, and design, republished for the
benefit of the modern reader with commentary by contemporary scholars.
Prospects in Visual Rhetoric emerges in the scholarly publishing world
to offer an opportunity for a new tradition to be forged, not so much
to build a canon, but to rewrite rhetorical tradition from a visual perspective.
It is our hope that looking backwards at significant writers and noteworthy
essays will allow scholars in the emerging field of visual rhetoric to
trace their history to the visual theories, critical commentaries, and
scholarly studies of the past.
Rhetoricians interested in the visual
turn of present-day scholarship will be able to extend their inquiry
into the styles, genres, and forms of aesthetic discourse of previous
decades and centuries. We hope that art historians, designers, and critics
of the visual will also benefit from reconceptualizing these key statements.

Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition

The Series provides compact, comprehensive
and convenient surveys of what has been learned through research and
practice as composition has emerged as an academic discipline over thelast half century. Each volume
is devoted to a single topic that has been of interest in rhetoric and
composition in recent years, to synthesize and make available the sum
and parts of what has been learned on that topic. These reference
guides are designed to help deepen classroom practice by making available
the collective wisdom of the field and will provide the basis for new
research. The Series is intended to be of use to teachers at all levels
of education, researchers and scholars of writing, graduate students
learning about the field, and all who have interest in or responsibility
for writing programs and the teaching of writing.

Parlor Press and The WAC Clearinghouse are collaborating so that these
books will be widely available through low-cost print editions and
free digital distribution. The publishers and the Series editor are teachers
and researchers of writing, committed to the principle that knowledge
should freely circulate. We see the opportunities that new technologies
have for further democratizing knowledge. And we see that to share
the
power of writing is to share the means for all to articulate their
needs, interest, and learning into the great experiment of literacy.

Parlor Press is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles
in print and multimedia formats, including Acrobat eBook and Night Kitchen
(TK3). For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications
visit the website. <http://www.parlorpress.com>, write to Parlor
Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson SC 29621, or e-mail David
Blakesley <editor@parlorpress.com>. 765.409.2649

Renaissance and Medieval Studies

Editor
Charles Ross
Purdue University

The Renaissance and Medieval Studies series focuses on editions, comparative studies, translations, and reprints of primary texts of the Renaissance and earlier in Italy, England, and France. The series also offers an outlet for electronic distribution of supplementary material for each printed volume from art history, film, and the history of the book.

Submission and Contact Information

Queries should be directed to Professor Ross at rosscs@purdue.edu or
by mail at Department of English, Purdue University, 500 Oval Dr., West
Lafayette, IN 47906. Questions can also be sent to Parlor Press at editor@parlorpress.com.

Parlor Press is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade
titles in print and multimedia formats, including Acrobat eBook and Night
Kitchen
(TK3).
For more information,
write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson SC 29621,
or e-mail David Blakesley, editor@parlorpress.com.

Rhetoric of Science and Technology

Series Editor
Alan G. Gross
University of Minnesota

The rhetoric of science and technology is a branch of rhetorical criticism that has grown rapidly since its inception four decades ago. Its initial focus was the texts of such well-known scientists as Darwin, Newton, and Watson and Crick. The field has since expanded to encompass important work on interdisciplinarity, the role of rhetorical schemes, the popular meanings of the gene, the rhetorical history of the scientific article, the question of incommensurability, and the critical engagement with emergent technologies. But this work and these topics by no means exhaust the field. Although the point has already been made that science and technology are in some sense rhetorical, the field remains open to new topics and innovative approaches. The Rhetoric of Science and Technology series of Parlor Press will publish works that address these and related topics:

The history of science and technology approached from a rhetorical perspective

Science and technology policy from a rhetorical point of view

The role of photographs, graphs, diagrams, and equations in the communication of science and technology

The role of schemes and tropes in the communication of science and technology

The methods used in rhetorical studies of science and technology, especially the predominance of case studies

The popularization of science by scientists and non-scientists

The effect of the Internet on communication in science and technology

The pedagogy of communicating science and technology to popular audiences and audiences of scientists and engineers

The inclusion of science and technology in rhetoric and composition courses

Submission and Contact Information

Queries should be directed to:

Alan G. Gross
Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities agross@umn.edu

Proposals should outline the rationale and projected audience for the book and its relation to other books in the field; include the book's table of contents or a chapter outline, the estimated length and the timetable for completion, and, if available, the introduction and a sample chapter. Please also send the CV of the author or editor.

Second Language Writing

Series Editor
Paul Kei Matsuda
Arizona State University

Second language writing emerged in the late twentieth century as an
interdisciplinary field of inquiry, and an increasing number of researchers
from various related fields—including applied linguistics, communication,
composition studies, and education—have come to identify themselves
as second language writing specialists. The Second Language Writing series
aims to facilitate the advancement of knowledge in the field of second
language writing by publishing scholarly and research-based monographs
and edited collections that provide significant new insights into central
topics and issues in the field.

This Series seeks submissions that expand, refine or challenge the existing
knowledge in the field by using various modes of inquiry, such as philosophical,
historical, empirical (quantitative and qualitative) and narrative. Some
of the possible topics include, but are not limited to:

the nature, backgrounds,
and characteristics of second or foreign language writing and writers;

issues in second language writing instruction, assessment, and program
administration;

the experience of second language writers, writing
teachers, and writing program administrators;

institutional policies,
politics,
and practices that affect second language writers;

instructional
practices in various institutional and disciplinary contexts;

implications
of
technological innovations on second language writing;

the relevance
of theories developed
in other fields;

the definition and historical development
of the field and its relationship with other fields; and

approaches
to inquiry
in
studying second language writing and writers.

Manuscripts that explore the implications of second language writing
issues in other related fields are also welcome.

Following the common practice in the field, submissions to this Series
should follow the current APA style.

Your proposal should outline the rationale and projected audience
for the book and its relation to other books in the field; include
the book's table of contents or a chapter outline, the estimated length
and
the timetable for completion, and the introduction and a sample chapter.
Please also send the c.v. of the author or editor.

Parlor Press is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles
in print and multimedia formats, including Acrobat eBook, iPaper, and Sophie. For additional submission information or to find out about Parlor
Press publications visit the website, http://www.parlorpress.com,
write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson SC 29621,
or
e-mail David
Blakesley <editor@parlorpress.com>. 765.409.2649

Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition Series

Series Description

The Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition series represents an attempt to foster a nationwide conversation—beginning with journal editors, but expanding to teachers, scholars and workers across the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition—to select essays that showcase the innovative and transformative work now being published in the field's journals. Representing both print and digital journals in the field, the essays in each edition represent a snapshot of the traditional and emergent conversations occurring in our field—from classroom practice to writing in global and digital contexts, from writing workshops to community activism. Together, the essays provide readers with a rich understanding of the present and future direction of the rhetoric and composition.

Essays included in the "Best" series undergo a rigorous review process. First, all essays must have already crossed the threshold to be published in an academic journal in the field. Then, out of all the essays published by a journal, the editor can only select two essays to nominate. Next, the "Best" series editors create reading groups across the country. These groups feature full-time faculty, adjunct faculty, and graduate students who teach in a range of institutions. In this way, all the nominated essays are assessed and ranked for how they speak to the interests of all those who work in our field—a review process which is unique to this series. The series editors, plus one or more guest editors, then make a final selection of essays that have the strongest support from the reading groups for inclusion in a particular volume

In this way, the Best of Journals in Rhetoric and Composition represents the only publication in the field that can truly claim to represent the students, teachers, as well as scholars' collective insight into the pressing issues and important of the current moment. For this reason, authors selected for inclusion are celebrated at their home institutions and journals actively seek recognition for their work in this series. Because the series provides a broad conception of scholarship in our field, the "Best" collections have found a home in introductory graduate courses and advanced undergraduate courses.

Finally, the "Best" series also provides financial support through sales for scholarship in the field of composition and rhetoric. All proceeds from sales are donated to secure space at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication to highlight this award-winning work. When someone purchases a book in the "Best" series, they are directly contributing to the ability of journals to continue to do their work. For this reason, the series editors hope that professors will assign this book in their classes, advertise it on their home webpages, and encourage their college/university libraries to purchase the series. Through these seemingly small acts of support, the infrastructure that produces new knowledge in our field will gain the necessary support it needs to survive (and thrive) in an "age of austerity."

Contact the Editors

To request consideration for inclusion on the list of journals contacted by the series editors to nominate work, please email Series editor Steve Parks at sjparks@syr.edu. To learn more about the series generally, contact Parlor Press at editor@parlorpress.com.

Illuminations: A Series on American Poetics

Series Editor
Jon Thompson, North Carolina State University

Since the period of high modernism, American poetic practice has sought nothing less than a revolution in poetry. The new language, rhetoric and form of the poetry of William Carlos Williams, T.S Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, H.D., Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens released new energies and new (or dramatically different hybrid) poetic practices. These practices were taken up, and extended, in successive generations by Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, James Schulyer and John Ashbery. More recently, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jorie Graham, Charles Wright, C.D. Wright, Susan Howe, Myung Mi Kim, Harryette Mullen and Claudia Rankine, to name just a few, have pushed this tradition of transformative practice and claimed new territories for poetry. As these names suggest, this tradition continues to be influential inside the English-speaking world, and outside it. Bearing in mind this legacy of innovation, Illuminations will focus on the poetics and poetic practices of the contemporary moment in the USA. The series is particularly keen to promote a set of reflective works that include, but go beyond, traditional academic prose, so we take Walter Benjamin's rich, poetic essays published under the title of Illuminations as an example of the kind of approach we most value. Collectively, the titles published in this series aim to help various audiences engage in a dialogue that will reimagine the field of contemporary American poetics.

Accordingly, the series is looking to publish in the following areas:

Autobiographical essays

Biographical essays

Craft essays

Hybrid essays

Discussions of poetry & pedagogy

Essays on poetics & poetic practices

Essays on form

Essays on poetics & politics

Essays on poetic traditions & genealogies

Discussions of race, ethnicity & poetry

Discussions of gender & poetry

Discussions of poetry & place

Essays on poetry & contemporary culture

Discussions of aesthetics

Comparative poetics

Multimedia projects

Illuminations will be looking for books shorter than the traditional academic monograph—books around one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five pages in print. Please submit a 1–2 page description of your book and a finished manuscript in the month of May each year to Submittable. Writers may expect a response within six months.

Click on this Submit button between May 1 and May 31 each year to visit the Illuminations submission interface at Submittable:

Books in the Series

Visual Rhetoric

Series Editor
Marguerite Helmers
University of Wisconsin-Oskosh

Visual culture studies and visual rhetoric have been increasing
areas of emphasis in scholarly studies. Drawing on the work of a variety
of theorists, from Kenneth Burke in rhetorical studies to Roland Barthes
in semiotics, and addressing a wide range of subjects, from supermarkets
to new media, scholars established visual cultural studies as a thriving
and significant area of inquiry for the new century. The impetus for
such study has been the awareness that Americans’ primary information
sources (television and the World Wide Web) are strongly graphic (or
visual) rather than print- or text-based in nature. This series will
encourage scholars working in rhetoric, cultural studies, and communication
to create new scholarly works that analyze visual phenomena. The intent
is to assist in the development of a dedicated publication venue for
visual rhetorical studies in order to establish coherence in what is
currently a disparate discipline.

The previously unquestioned hegemony of verbal text is being challenged
by what W. J. T. Mitchell labels the “pictorial turn” (Picture
Theory)—a recognition of the importance and ubiquity of images
in the dissemination and reception of information, ideas, and opinions—processes
that lie at the heart of all rhetorical practices, social movements,
and cultural institutions. In the past decade, many scholars have called
for collaborative ventures, in essence for disciplining of the study
of visual information into a new field, variously labeled visual rhetoric,
visual culture studies, or “image studies.” This proposed
new field would bring together the work currently being accomplished
by scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, including art theory, anthropology,
rhetoric, cultural studies, psychology, and media studies.

Mission

The Visual Rhetoric series of Parlor Press will publish works
that address the following themes:

Political examinations of the role of the image in society;

Analyses
of the production of images, objects, or visual phenomena in society;

Historical considerations of the reception of the image to particular
times, places, and people;

Analyses of the relationship between representation, communication,
and knowledge;

Working and Writing for Change

The Writing and Working for Change series began during the 100th anniversary celebrations of NCTE. It was designed to recognize the collective work of teachers of English, Writing, Composition, and Rhetoric to work within and across diverse identities to ensure the field recognize and respect language, educational, political, and social rights of all students, teachers, and community members. While initially solely focused on the work of NCTE/CCCC Special Interest Groups and Caucuses, the series now includes texts written by individuals in partnership with other communities struggling for social recognition and justice.

An Imprint Series of Parlor Press

Series Editors
Steve Parks, Syracuse University
Jess Pauszek, Syracuse University

The Writing and Working for Change series began during the 100th anniversary celebrations of NCTE. It was designed to recognize the collective work of teachers of English, Writing, Composition, and Rhetoric to work within and across diverse identities to ensure the field recognize and respect language, educational, political, and social rights of all students, teachers, and community members. While initially solely focused on the work of NCTE/CCCC Special Interest Groups and Caucuses, the series now includes texts written by individuals in partnership with other communities struggling for social recognition and justice.

Current Publications

CCCC/NCTE Caucuses

History of the Black Caucus National Council Teachers of English by Marianna White Davis. Download the free PDF.

Listening to Our Elders: Working and Writing for Social Change by Samantha Blackmon, Cristina Kirklighter, and Steve Parks

Reflections publishes academic research that emerges from community-engaged writing projects as well as the non-academic genres produced by project participants—the poetry, essays, photographs, and memoirs that often emerge from such work. We invite submissions from anyone who has been involved in a service-learning, community literacy, or community writing project, including community members, university, college, or public school faculty, students, and activists. https://reflectionsjournal.net/

Spark: a 4C4Equality Journal is an open-access, online, annual journal that provides a community for activist students, teachers, and researchers in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies to argue for the public and disciplinary value of their social justice pursuits. Such justice work may be localized within a public school, neighborhood, or campus, or as far-reaching as regional and international efforts. It may intersect with movements such as Black Lives Matter, or campaigns, such as Immigrant Rights. Ultimately, the work should speak to the power of intersectional and collaborative efforts at political change. https://sparkactivism.com/

Submission and Contact Information

Writing Program Administration

Series Editors
Chris Carter
University of Cincinnati

Laura Micciche
University of Cincinnati

In the past few decades writing program administration has emerged as a field of inquiry with its own national organization, journal, and conference. The Writing Program Administration series provides a venue for scholarly monographs and projects that are research or theory-based and that provide insights into important issues in the field. We encourage submissions that examine WPA work broadly defined (e.g., not limited to studies of first-year composition programs). Possible books in the series might address topics including but not limited to the following:

Historical studies of writing program administration or administrators (archival work is particularly encouraged)

Your proposal should outline the rationale and projected audience
for the book and its relation to other books in the field; include
the book's table of contents or a chapter outline, the estimated length
and
the timetable for completion, and the introduction and a sample chapter.
Please also send the c.v. of the author or editor.

Parlor Press is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles
in print and multimedia formats, including Acrobat eBook, ePub, and Kindle. For additional submission information or to find out about Parlor
Press publications visit the website, http://www.parlorpress.com,
write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson SC 29621,
or
e-mail David
Blakesley <editor@parlorpress.com>. 765.409.2649.

Writing Travel

Series Editor
Jeanne Moskal
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Writing Travel series publishes work in the new field of travel studies.

Theoretical and historical treatments of ways in which
travel and travel writing engage such questions as religion, nationalism/cosmopolitanism,
and empire; gender and sexuality; race, ethnicity, and immigration;
and
the history of the book, print culture, and translation

Biographies of significant travelers or groups of travelers
(including but not limited to pilgrims, missionaries, anthropologists,
tourists, explorers, immigrants)

Critical studies of the works of significant travelers or groups
of travelers

Pedagogy of travel and travel literature and its place in
curricula

Original travel writing that explicitly engages its generic precedents or the historically complicated conditions of travel.

Submission Information

The Writing Travel series is presently not reviewing new work while we catch up with a high volume of submissions and books in production. Please watch this space for further updates.

Contact Information

Queries should be directed to Jeanne Moskal, Department of English, Campus
Box 3520, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520.
Email inquiries should be directed to editor@parlorpress.com.

Parlor Press is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles
in print and multimedia formats, including Acrobat eBook and Night Kitchen
(TK3). For additional submission information or to find out about Parlor
Press publications visit the website, http://www.parlorpress.com,
write to Parlor Press, 83015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson SC 29621,
or
e-mail David
Blakesley <editor@parlorpress.com>. 765.409.2649

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing

Parlor Press is pleased to announce an exciting new collaborative project with the WAC Clearinghouse and series editors Charlie Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky.
Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing is a new textbook series seeking proposals for essays for the composition classroom. Each volume of Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing will contain peer-reviewed collections of essays all composed by teachers for students, freely available for download under a Creative Commons license.

Reviews

Volumes in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing will offer multiple perspectives on a wide-range of topics about writing, much like the model made famous by Wendy Bishop’s The Subject Is . . . series. In each chapter, a rich variety of authors will present their unique views, insights, and strategies for writing by addressing the undergraduate reader directly. Drawing on their own experiences, these teachers-as-writers will invite students to join in the larger conversation about developing nearly every aspect of their craft. Consequently, each essay will function as a standalone text which will easily complement other selected readings in writing or writing-intensive courses across the disciplines at any level. Thus with your submissions and the publication of subsequent volumes of essays, the Writing Spaces website will become a large library of student-centered instructional essays on writing for all across our field to use in the composition classroom.

The theme for Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Vol. 1 will be first-year composition, and we invite authors to submit a proposal for a chapter on any topic about writing suitable for a first-year class. For example,

* College writing vs. what you did in high school
* Freewriting
* Why invention is important
* Finding a topic for your personal narrative
* Drawing on personal experience in your writing
* Understanding the rhetorical situation
* What is creativity?
* What do we mean by that term "style?"
* Developing the appropriate voice for your audience
* Getting to the draft
* What makes a good thesis and how to focus your paper
* Best practices for conducting research
* The Internet as a space for communication and research
* Effective quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing
* Re-vision as re-seeing your text
* Why proofreading is important
* Primary research: the I-search paper, ethnography, or interviewing
* Logic in argumentative writing
* Collaborative writing
* New media writing

Because each chapter in Writing Spaces is an essay, authors will want to strike a balance between instruction and creating a text that demonstrates excellent essay writing, with an appropriate and strong, engaging voice for a student audience. An essay could provide students with good writing advice and strategies. Or it might exemplify the type of essay writing that presents perspectives that stimulate critical thinking and invigorating class conversations. Any essay that incorporates outside material should also serve as a student-friendly model for demonstrating effective attribution and integration of sources.

Chapters in this collection could draw on personal experiences and include narrative writing. Student voices and examples are encouraged (student permission required), and visuals can be included in the text. Collaboratively written essays are also welcome.

Each proposal will be a 300-400 word abstract that clearly states the focus and purpose of the essay and briefly outlines the working structure of the piece. Furthermore, abstracts should indicate whether or not and how student voices and/or visuals will be included.

Proposals are due by April 10, 2009 and are to be submitted online via the Writing Spaces website as a .doc, .pdf, .rtf, or .odt file. Authors will be notified by e-mail about the status of their proposals by May 15, 2009. The publication of the first volume is planned for January of 2010. More information for authors and a link to our submission form is available in the authors area of our website: http://writingspaces.org/authors.

Upon publication, individual essays and a full electronic version of the first volume will be available for free download from the Writing Spaces' website. Teachers may upload these onto their course management websites or integrate them into course packs--royalty free. As they are published, print editions of each volume will be available through Parlor Press.